Recently did a "knife-start" run of SoC.
The idea is that you start every map without any equipment and use only whatever you could get on the map. So,you start the game as usual, but before transferring to Garbage just drop everything you have in some container. And this before every map.
For my run, I allowed only artifacts to be carried with me constantly - which puts them to a good use. Also, underground levels are considered to be the part of above levels, like Agroprom + tunnels, Dark Valley + X16, and so on.
Cordon is done as usual, I only did stick around before midnight to grab stamina artifacts. Also don't kill any soldiers like I usually do.
At Garbage, don't trigger the shakedown scene - the trio of pseudo-bandits won't turn hostile. In fact, if Yurik is killed, the trio splits and they just wander around the map. I had one of these guys fighting actual bandits at car cemetery.
You should have few stashes marked in your PDA, so makes sense to run around and grab some supplies. I had a stash with yellow jacket in the east of the map (you also can find bandit jacket in the train) and picked gun from some dead guy. Ammo is not really a problem, but I didn't go for 9x18 MP5 because of hardcore radiation.
Agroprom is easy, just wait until soldiers kill all stalkers and move to inner courtyard. Then grab merc armor, plenty of loot in corpses, and then it is a piece of cake.
Dark Valley could be hard as it has no traders and plenty of bandits around. In my run A-life helped me and spawned two bandits and dogs right as I entered it - they killed the Dolg guy and wandered off, so I got myself a nice AN-94 to go. I cleaned the smaller factory first to stock on looted ammo and then went to the Borov HQ, you can also find another merc armor in the armory there.
Wild Territory looks really tough. You have plenty of mercs waiting for you and no ways to actually get anything at all. At first.
Running past snipers is easy, the guy below could be bypassed without problems, and two guys next too. In my run I was very lucky to have the stash in cabin above on eastern side of the map. It has merc armor, AR-15 and ammo. After this, all goes smooth - though scientist didn't make it.
Yantar is piss easy, just dash to Sakharov and buy whatever you need from him. He has orange suit and SA-80, but I didn't need it as zombies dropped AR-15s with 100% quality.
Warehouses - easy too. You don't even have to stick around, but I did. Picked guns from dead Svoboda guys at the entrance, bought ammo, looted Svoboda arsenal - and I was set to go.
Radar is where you really had to work. I dashed past all Monolith guys to the forest, dodged dogs, knifed some zombies (since they're as good as blind) and thus got at least some weapons for myself. Then I go back to the first Monolith sniper, he dies, I pick Dolg armor.
Now I have armor, AR-15 and whopping 25 rounds for it, plus one grenade. I go back to the first Monolith outpost with five guys to kill them and get loot ammo. They already forgot about me and were cracking jokes around the fire. Here I was either lucky or just got good - two went down by grenade, two got headshots and fifth survived for longest, but not for too long. After that just clean the road from Monolith dudes with minimal ammo usage and grab their supplies, slowly but steadily. The map is good and you can aim better for headshots. The guy at the end of the right turn (X-10 from builds) has G-36 which helps.
In Pripyat, I stick around with stalkers to let them kill stuff and die, grab all the loot I can find and then move west. This allows me to bypass more Monolith guys and get decoder with good armor in Hotel. You can get more ammo and weapons in Pripyat but I didn't think it was necessary.
Then, I treat the rest of the game as a single map. ChAES-1 has no reasons for you to stick around, just dash to the entrance either the regular way or speedrunner detour way.
Sarcophagus-1 without armor, isn't it cool? If you did regular way on ChAES-1 you should have at least some weapon, if you did speedrunner one you have nothing but the knife. So shoot or knife the sniper in the first hallway, and make sure you get at least 10-15 rounds for Gauss. Reload if not. Then the mad dash to hidden exoskeleton. If you collected your artifacts right, you should have +20% bullet res on top of exoskeleton native 60% which means that you barely give a fuck about people shooting at you. The rest of the game is tedious, but quite doable, given plenty of 9x39 and 5.56 ammo around.
About artifacts, I carried on me a lot of them.
Five to soak radiation. Usually I equipped all five only to quickly cleanse myself, and only one to offset radiation from another artifacts. Even five -30 rad artifacts are not enough to keep you clean if you go in really hot zones (like aforementioned exoskeleton secret), but, for example, two -30 keep you clean at most of modestly irradiated places.
Five regen ones. Sometimes used if I had to save some medikits or didn't have any.
One good anti-bleeding art to stop the bleeding if I had no bandages. Not really necessary as five good regen artifacts can keep you from bleeding to death.
The combo of three -30 antirad arts and two +600 regen ones can keep you alive if you got red radiation somewhere but have no meds to flush it.
Couple of stamina arts for running around.
Five +30% electroshock res arts, good thing to have but I barely used them. You know the bug they enable, though I didn't use it.
And the very important bullet res artifacts. Necklace is the best, gives +5% res without radiation penalty but good luck finding all five of them. In my run I was limited to 2 necklaces + 2 flowers + 1 -30 rad ones for 16% bullet res. In Pripyat you can get two stars to replace stones and have 20% bullet res.
Good thing about this run is that you really have to use artifacts a lot, juggling them in the needed combos. At this point I really wished for shortcuts to quickly put artifact combos on and off
